Earthbound Spirit
"...What kind of bolt from the blue is this."
I woke to find people flying through the sky.
Not merely falling—soaring as if they had wings sprouting from their backs, wheeling and tumbling through the air.
Just so there is no misunderstanding: this was not some half-awake confusion of dream and reality. Nor was I drowning in nostalgia for a modern world I could never return to, hallucinating aircraft that did not yet exist in this age.
The travelers of the open sky I had met in the Middle Ages were flying against their will, not by choice.
"You thrice-damned servants of evil, a thousand deaths would not be enough! I shall make you pay the price for daring to defile the sacred...!"
The one forcibly treating them to the experience of flight was, of course, Sister Rebecca.
A woman who ranked my safety first under any circumstances, she had flipped the moment she sensed the ambush. She tore into the wretched serfs like a savage beast, smashing them to pieces.
I am not joking when I say she ought to be classified as an actual wild animal. How does a low kick send a man's entire leg flying?
"Gyaaaaah! My leg, my leg!"
"A-Am I flying?"
"Damn it, I told you we should quit!"
"I-I'm sorry! I truly had no idea a person of such importance was aboard! Please, just once, show mercy—"
Naturally, a ragtag mob of serfs stood no chance against her. Dozens of able-bodied adult men were being one-sidedly thrashed by a girl of middle-school age, and the outcome was already decided.
"Don't kill them!"
"I am controlling my strength, so you need not worry."
Fearing that Rebecca, eyes rolled back in fury, might slaughter every last serf right here, I tried to intervene—only to receive a reply that left me genuinely shocked.
This was her holding back? People cartwheeling through the air, limbs flying off?
I briefly wondered whether I had misunderstood the meaning of "controlling one's strength," then realized she was not entirely wrong and felt a splitting headache.
Right. If she had truly intended to kill them, those men would already have been reduced to handfuls of ash scattering on the wind.
Just like the pitiful peddlers who had once been foolish enough to sneak into our village.
"...Mm."
I did not feel good about this.
I knew her flames would never turn on me, yet a nameless nausea made me want to look away.
No—truthfully, I knew exactly what the reason was.
I simply did not want to accept it.
The lingering attachments of my previous life still clung to my ankles.
"Hic, kuhhh..."
"S-See, I told you we should quit..."
Well, clinging to memories of a past life was meaningless anyway.
I gave my head a light shake to clear the stray thoughts and checked the serfs' condition.
Most of them were rolling on the ground with serious injuries from Rebecca's merciless violence, yet surprisingly none had suffered wounds immediately life-threatening.
A perfect setup for extracting information one-sidedly. Time to pick a suitably stupid one and have a sincere little chat.
"Excuse me, are you all right?"
I approached one serf who looked anything but all right and, under the pretense of kindness, adjusted his posture.
Thanks to my remarkable consideration, the young serf now rolled on the dirt in a slightly more comfortable position. He turned toward me with a thoroughly flustered expression.
"What on earth happened to all of you that you would do... something like this?"
And so I learned the story of how these men had turned to banditry.
A story that, in every respect, far exceeded my expectations.
Every problem had begun when the Count of Avignon became obsessed with a heretical cult.
Ensnared by some rootless cult of unknown origin, he had drawn seawater inland to use as irrigation in the name of praying for abundance, and had even liquidated the family fortune to erect a proper altar for offering prayers to some so-called sea god or other.
Naturally, agriculture in his demesne collapsed into utter ruin. Having squandered his wealth on sea-god fan-club activities, the Count of Avignon had no money left to fix the mess.
Even if he had possessed the funds, whether he would have used them to fix anything remained an open question.
In any case, once that year's harvest went spectacularly to hell, the serfs began to feel their very lives threatened.
Their livelihood consisted of tilling land borrowed from the Count of Avignon—and that very land had been devastated by its own owner.
Up to this point, things were still manageable.
The cause and process were more than a little absurd, yet the actual damage amounted only to certain fields becoming unharvestable.
The Count of Avignon's personal demesne was not particularly large.
Though the lands ruled by House Avignon were said to be the greatest granary of the south, a closer look revealed that the territory was parceled out among lesser lords and knights under his banner.
Thus the devastation of the Count's own demesne was not as catastrophic as one might think.
Of course, a lord falling under the thrall of a heretical cult and personally wrecking his own land was shocking enough—but that alone could never paralyze the security of an entire region or turn every last serf into a bandit.
The failed harvest was limited to the Count's demesne, not the whole of Avignon.
Whether the Count went bankrupt or not, so long as his vassals remained intact, any rebellion by a portion of the serfs should have been crushed long ago. That was the normal order of things.
Yet somewhere along the line, everything had gone wrong.
The vassals of the Count of Avignon failed to crush the peasant uprising. Instead the serfs displayed abnormal combat power—beheading knights, looting noble storehouses—and succeeded in plunging all of Avignon into the abyss of civil war.
Now even neighboring lords, eyeing the ownerless lands, were circling and waiting for their chance.
"Something's off."
At this point a normal reincarnator would investigate why the situation had grown so severe and search for a solution... but unfortunately I possessed no talent for unraveling such complicated problems.
At best I could think about realistic ways to reduce the damage.
"Sister Rebecca, would you mind treating these people a little?"
Now that things had come to this, looking the other way was not an option.
Seeing the attackers' condition steadily worsen, I asked Rebecca for help.
"Pardon? These are sinners who dared attempt harm against the Saintess. There is no need to bestow grace upon such blasphemous creatures—"
"This is a direct request from that very Saintess. Please treat their wounds."
Naturally Sister Rebecca tried to dissuade me with a look of pure dismay, but the Lantern Bearer of the Order was a pitiful post that required obedience when ordered.
When I flopped onto the ground and threw a tantrum about whether she expected me to simply watch people die, Sister Rebecca made a great show of doing it only because she had been told to, and proceeded to fit the serfs' arms and legs back into their proper places.
Then silence again.
Having realigned the patients' limbs and even wrapped bandages over them, Sister Rebecca tilted her head in confusion when she saw I was still lying flat on the ground.
So I helpfully pointed to the lantern hanging at her waist.
"Surely you cannot mean... that I am to use it on them?"
Sister Rebecca had clearly never expected me to go so far as to demand the use of divine power, yet I was the one left wondering why she had stopped at first aid.
If first aid had been all that was needed, I would have done it myself rather than make her do it.
Was she saying that even divine power was too good for the likes of these serfs? This feudal sensibility of hers grew harder to understand by the day.
"If divine power is used here, there is a risk that the Saintess's identity will be exposed..."
When I fixed her with a sullen stare, she approached and whispered the reason she could not use divine power.
It was not an unfounded concern.
Calling me "Saintess" freely in front of others and then fretting that my identity might be revealed was a touch contradictory, yet merely using a title and openly displaying divine power were entirely different matters.
And now I had asked her to use that power on people who had been enemies only moments earlier. From Sister Rebecca's perspective I must have seemed to have eaten something strange.
But I had not spoken without thought.
First, so long as an unidentified cult like the Sea God faith was entangled in the chaos of the County of Avignon, any rumor that the Saintess of the Vesta Order had appeared would likely be dismissed as empty gossip.
Originally our Order had been the voice and last bulwark of the powerless common folk.
In its final days it had been cursed from every side for horrific corruption and decadence and abandoned even by the Goddess, yet before that the Order had truly been a force that helped people.
With peasant uprisings raging across Avignon, word that the Order had been revived would simply be written off as the delusion of stupid serfs and buried.
Moreover, we currently had the goal of recruiting a usable knight.
The chaos throughout Avignon would have flooded the labor market with excellent merchandise; with the cooperation of the local residents we could scoop them up with ease.
"Please."
So hurry up and treat these people.
I need to turn them into informants if capturing a full-time knight is going to be easy.
"U-Umm."
Even as she drew forth the power of the lantern, the world's most worry-prone Sister Rebecca kept glancing at me as if to ask whether this was truly all right. I simply nodded with a calm expression.
...At least I would not have to watch anyone die right in front of me. That was a relief.